bird icon for twitter bird icon for twitter


Scientism and America's Drug War hypocrisy

by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

May 16, 2021



America's addiction to scientism has addicted 1 in 4 American women to SSRIs, because of the mistaken belief that such therapy is "scientific" and therefore warrants the creation of such an unprecedented pharmacological dystopia -- dystopia for human beings, but a godsend for Big Pharma of course, whose bottom line has increased by several orders of magnitude over the last half century. Americans feel all warm and cuddly when they hear the party line that such antidepressants 1 fix some chemical imbalance in the brain, failing to realize that, A, this was originally a PR line, not a medical claim, and B, the latest evidence shows that such meds cause the imbalance that they claim to fix.

Even if we grant the idea that some chemical imbalance is being fixed, the real question is, what constitutes a cure for depression? Is depression cured when a tranquilizing med keeps folks from worrying as much about their lack of satisfaction in life, or is depression cured when a patient sees through the fog of masochistic bad habits and begins seeing the wonders in the world around them? The psychoactive medicines that we fear and criminalize hold the ability to waken new worlds in our minds and make us finally see the world around us in all its wonderful detail and possibility. But psychiatry is never so ambitious as to aim for that kind of cure, one that can restart a life. A real solution for depression does not pay very well, and if they truly championed such a move, they would have to risk their jobs by publicly holding the Drug War in contempt, something very few American professionals are willing to do.

So we westerners shrink in horror at the thought of tribal men in robes availing themselves of non-addictive psychoactive plants to cure what ails a person -- or an entire community -- yet we have our own superstitions. We worship the kindly men and women in white robes who lead us through the ritual of clinic visits and prescription writing, even though the meds in question make us lifelong patients. Well, at least we're being cured scientifically, we think, and not by those evil plants of the rainforest. So we're addicted for life? So what? We're still proudly scientific!

This is just one of those problems that is just too enormous to be seen by anyone in America, immersed as we are in the omnipresent self-congratulatory banter of the status quo, our proud scientific country marching forth with "cures" -- cures that make everyone cheer except the patient, who finds themselves disempowered and abandoned, even by the so-called addiction experts who know better than to characterize Big Pharma 2 3 dependency as addiction. Why not? Because "addiction" is a political term in a Drug War society, where we ban medicines, not based on science but based on the fears and prejudices of pharmacologically challenged politicians.


Notes:

1: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
2: How Drug Company Money Is Undermining Science Seife, Charles, Scientific American, 2012 (up)
3: Why Is Biopharma Paying 75% of The FDA’s Drug Division Budget? LaMartinna, John, Forbes, 2022 (up)







Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




Drug war pundits need to stop using the word "snorts" when it comes to cocaine. We "take" our "meds," and yet we "snort" cocaine, just like a pig. That is NOT neutral language, folks!

"In consciousness dwells the wondrous, with it man attains the realm beyond the material, and the peyote tells us where to find it." --Antonin Arnaud

Freud's real discovery was that drugs like cocaine could make psychiatry UNNECESSARY for the vast majority of people. The medical establishment hated the idea -- so they judged the drug based on its worst possible use!

People are talking about re-scheduling psilocybin, but they miss the point. We need to DE-schedule everything. It's anti-scientific to conclude in advance that any drug has no uses -- and it's a lie too, of course. End drug scheduling altogether! It's childish and wrong.

A pharmacologically savvy drug dealer would have no problem getting someone off one drug because they would use the common sense practice of fighting drugs with drugs. But materialist doctors would rather that the patient suffer than to use such psychologically obvious methods.

Someone needs to create a group called Drug Warriors Anonymous, a place where Americans can go to discuss their right to mind and mood medicine and to discuss the many ways in which our society trashes godsend medicines.

That's how antidepressants came about: the idea that sadness was a simple problem that science could solve. Instead of being caused by a myriad of interrelated issues, we decided it was all brain chemistry that could be treated with precision. Result? Mass chemical dependency.

Americans love to hate heroin. But there is no rational reason why folks should not use heroin daily in a world in which we consider it their medical duty to use antidepressants daily.

Until prohibition ends, rehab is all about enforcing a Christian Science attitude toward psychoactive medicines (with the occasional hypocritical exception of Big Pharma meds).

Almost all addiction services assume that the goal should be to get off all drugs. That is not science, it is Christian Science.


Click here to see All Tweets against the hateful War on Us






How the Drug War Blinds us to Godsend Medicine
Join Philosophers Against the Drug War


This site uses no cookies! This site features no ads!



Thanks for visiting The Drug War Philosopher at abolishthedea.com, featuring essays against America's disgraceful drug war. Updated daily.

Copyright 2025, Brian Ballard Quass Contact: quass@quass.com


(up)